As an approach to stimulate consumers' appetite for purchase of articles, such as cosmetics and health food, samples are distributed. To enhance the effect of the approach, it is important to identify (target) an appropriate group of potential purchasers for an article art provide a sample of the article for the group. Conventionally, as means for enhancing the accuracy of targeting the group of potential purchasers, there has been adopted a method of, based on the assumption that readers of particular magazines or purchasers of other articles are overlapped with a group of potential purchasers for a target article, providing a sample of the article for those who have purchased such magazines or other articles at stores. In this case, the result of distributing samples may be managed by collecting information about the distributed samples, for example, by reading bar-codes attached to the samples provided for the purchasers of the magazines and the like with the use of a terminal of a POS (point-of-sales) system.
Furthermore, personal information may be registered with a predetermined database, and services, such as provision of samples, according to the attributes of each person may be performed, based on attribute information (such as interests, preferences, age, sex, and occupation) included in the personal information (Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 2002-99700, for example). There is also proposed a mechanism in which a member network is constructed online, samples are distributed based on personal information and attribute information about the members, and questionnaires are distributed and collected via e-mail by utilizing the network in order to grasp the utilization trend after the samples are distributed (Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 2002-41754, for example).
By managing personal attribute information in a database and distributing samples in consideration of the attributes of each person as in the prior-art techniques, the accuracy of targeting a group of potential purchasers for a target article can be enhanced, and thereby effectively stimulating the consumers' appetite for the target article.
As described above, when attempting to stimulate consumers' appetite for purchase of an article through services such as provision of samples, it is important to realize suitable targeting of a group of potential purchasers for the target article.
With the prior approach of providing samples for readers of magazines and purchasers of other articles on the assumption that the readers and purchasers are overlapped with a group of potential purchasers for a target article, however, it is not possible to grasp in detail the attributes of the purchasers of magazines and other articles.
In addition, the overlap between the purchasers is presumed only based on the past sales results of similar articles and the like. Therefore, the accuracy of targeting is limited.
By comparison, with the prior-art technique in which the target for which samples are to be provided is determined based on attribute information included in personal information registered with a database, the attributes of each of the registered persons can be grasped in detail, thereby enabling targeting with a high accuracy. In this technique, however, the personal information is registered with the database, and therefore, consumers to be registered are apt to be negative in the registration with the database in fear that their registered personal information may be stolen or leaked. In such cases, the object of stimulating consumers' appetite for articles is not satisfied even though the accuracy of targeting is high, since the number of persons to whom samples are to be provided decreases.
In addition to the case of distributing samples, the same problems as described above are also caused in providing various services and information.